Twenty years ago, on this day, February 19 2003, carbon capture and storage got another nudge forward, at least in terms of rhetoric…
19 to 21 Feb 2003 As discussed earlier, the 2002 Geneva meeting produced a plan for an exploratory workshop on the issue, which took place in November 2002 in Regina, Canada. The actual process of report preparation began after the formal decision to compile the report, made at the IPCC meeting in February 2003 in Paris.
(Narita, 2012: 90)
https://archive.ipcc.ch/meetings/session20/final-report.pdf
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 375.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
In the aftermath of the President George “The Supreme Court got me the gig” Bush having pulled the USA out of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, attention turned to various techno-fixes, including Carbon Capture and Storage, which had been in the background/on the drawing board for a decade plus.
Longer term context – some had clearly been eyeing the deep oceans as places to dump waste, and this had gotten the ‘right’ scientists curious…
“Second, ocean mixing. Here too Revelle had a long-established curiosity, and here too nuclear energy pushed the topic forward. The wastes from nuclear reactors must be disposed of somewhere, and the ocean floor seemed a likely choice. In 1955 when Revelle spoke of studying ocean circulation he emphasized the need to bury the “unbelievable quantities of radioactive substances” expected to pour from civilian reactors…”
Weart 1997 342
What I think we can learn from this
Dreams of technological salvation are very popular, but always need someone to write them. And the money to pay those people to write those fantasies has to come from somewhere…
What happened next
The IPCC’s special report on CCS came out in early 2005, and was a very big deal – an example of the halo effect of the credibility of impact science being lent to production science. But the CCS plants have still not yet been built, and the ones that did were all about Enhanced Oil “Recovery”.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.